Wellington as it was

(First published in The Dominion Post, June 14.)

ALL THIS discussion in the paper about Wellington’s future is all very well, but at my stage in life it’s much more fun talking about the past.

I got my first job in the reading room of the Evening Post in 1968. My workmates were a glorious collection of oddballs.

I got paid $21 a week – more if I worked the Sports Post shift on Saturday afternoon. I got paid on Thursday and was invariably broke by Monday. The deputy head reader, a man named Vic, was my financial lifeline.

When I got down to my last one and sixpence, it was a choice between a packet of Grey’s cigarettes – the only brand available in packs of 10 – or a Cheffy’s pie from the dairy around the corner. I usually chose the fags.

I flatted at the bottom of Devon St, in the Aro Valley. I swear everyone who ever lived in Wellington spent time flatting in Devon St. I had a neighbour with wild red hair whom everyone knew as Jungle Jim, whose flat was visited frequently by the police.

Legend had it that Jungle Jim once broke into a fisheries coolstore, slipped on the icy floor and knocked himself cold. He was found there, nearly dead from exposure, when the staff turned up in the morning.

John Steinbeck would have recognised Wellington in the late 1960s; it was full of such picaresque characters. The underworld gathered at the Forester’s Arms Hotel in Ghuznee St; the publican, an old schoolmate of mine, was once convicted on the rare charge of allowing his premises to be frequented by habitual criminals.

I had my first pub drink in the Royal Oak Hotel’s famous Bistro Bar. I was 17 and my eyes must have stood out on stalks. Upstairs, the Royal Oak was quite posh, but the Bistro Bar was the haunt of prostitutes, transvestites and junkies. Even at midday it was like a scene from a Federico Fellini film.

I met the woman who would become my wife at the Beachcomber coffee lounge in Oriental Bay – virtually the only place in town that routinely stayed open beyond midnight. Mother Grundy licensing laws meant the Beachcomber was officially dry, but everyone took alcohol that they surreptitiously added to their Coke.

Back then the only licensed premises, besides pubs, were a handful of licensed restaurants. I never quite understood the basis on which the authorities awarded liquor licences to such places, but it clearly had nothing to do with the quality of the tucker. Des Britten’s Coachman and Madame Louise’s Le Normandie were notable exceptions.

The advent of the first BYO restaurants in the 1970s – places such as the Van Gogh and Harry Seresin’s Settlement – was the culinary equivalent of the Prague Spring. They were the trailblazers for today’s vibrant hospitality sector. But I admit to a nostalgic soft spot for the old Wellington grill rooms and steak bars, mostly owned by Greeks, of which the illustrious Green Parrot is the sole survivor.

* * *

THE MAYOR then was Sir Frank Kitts. In retrospect, he was the perfect mayor for his time. Wellington may have had its defiant splashes of colour and non-conformist behaviour here and there, but generally speaking it was a grey, buttoned-down city.

The towering Sir Frank was as dull as he was tall. He deduced that the key to popularity was to turn up at everything, which earned him the nickname the tea-party mayor. It seemed to work: he became the longest-serving mayor in the city’s history.

Michael Fowler, who replaced him, was a different proposition altogether – an engaging extrovert who roused Wellington from a long period of civic slumber.

Since then the city has been well served by a succession of energetic mayors, notably Fran Wilde, Mark Blumsky and Kerry Prendergast, but some of the forward momentum seems to have been lost under Celia Wade-Brown.

I think of her as the accidental mayor. I suspect that if those who voted for her – probably with the intention of giving Ms Prendergast a fright – had realised thousands of others were doing the same, they might have put their tick elsewhere.

Would John Morrison be able to arrest the slide? I have no idea.

* * *

THESE DAYS I live in the Wairarapa – Masterton, to be precise – and barely a week passes when I don’t bump into another refugee from Wellington. The place is overrun with them.

There’s more space here, the weather is a lot less challenging and the pace is more relaxed. I bet you didn’t know, for example, that there isn’t a single traffic light in the Wairarapa.

Wellington has changed in all sorts of ways. I can walk the length of the city these days and not see a single familiar face, something that wouldn’t have happened even 10 years ago.

But if you asked people who now live on this side of the Rimutaka Hill about why the Wairarapa is so appealing, I bet most would say that one of the reasons is its proximity to Wellington. It’s hard to shake the place out of your system.

Free speech is fine, just as long as it doesn't upset anyone

(First published in the Nelson Mail and Manawatu Standard, June 5.)

What do a world-famous historian, a British author and a New Zealand cartoonist have in common?

On the face of it, not much – except that all three have been embroiled recently in controversies that show how fragile the right of free speech has become in supposedly liberal democracies.

Let’s start with the historian: Niall Ferguson, arguably the most distinguished contemporary British historian, and a man whose face is familiar internationally as a result of several television documentary series based on his books. 

In response to a question at a recent seminar in California, Ferguson referred to the fact that John Maynard Keynes, the British economist whose writing had a huge influence on 20^th century governments, was homosexual.

He went further, suggesting that Keynes’ economic philosophy was influenced by the fact that he was childless. According to one reporter’s notes, Ferguson implied this meant that Keynes was indifferent to the long-term effects of economic policies.

The historian’s off-the-cuff comments sparked a storm of indignation. One overwrought commentator, journalist Tom Kostigen, wrote that it took gay-bashing to new heights. “Anyone with a moral conscience should be outraged,” Kostigen spluttered.

What Ferguson said about Keynes wasn’t new. The Austrian economist Joseph Schumpeter, in his obituary of Keynes, had made an explicit link between Keynes’ childlessness and his “short-run” philosophy of life. Other scholars have suggested that Keynes’ famously fatalistic remark, “In the long run we are all dead”, was influenced by the fact that he had no offspring to be concerned about.

But it seems we have become a much more touchy society. Certain ideas are no longer allowed to be expressed. The uproar over Ferguson’s remark was such that he felt compelled to apologise and retract.

No doubt he had his reasons for doing so. However it’s hard to escape the impression that more and more often, public figures who have made controversial statements feel forced to back down not because what they said was indefensible, but because their wrathful critics promise to make their life intolerable unless they do.

A man as scholarly and experienced as Ferguson is unlikely to be in the habit of blurting out silly remarks without any forethought. He would have studied Keynes’ life and formed certain conclusions about him. So you have to wonder whether he was intimidated into backing down despite genuinely believing what he had said.

Even if his theory about Keynes is pure speculation and possibly erroneous, so what? People are entitled in a free society to get things wrong.

Academics float theories all the time. Some are wacky and die a natural death, while others extend the boundaries of human understanding. If people were barred from expressing unpopular or unorthodox ideas, conventional wisdom would never be challenged and human thought would be at a standstill.

The worrying thing about the Ferguson controversy is that it adds to a growing body of evidence that certain subjects are off-limits. Ultra-sensitive minority groups – the gay lobby being one – are primed to react explosively to every imagined slight.

Anyone who opposes same-sex marriage risks being labelled a gay-basher, just as people espousing welfare reform are routinely condemned as beneficiary-bashers. If you question the politics of separatism, you’re a racist; if you criticise Israel, you’re an anti-Semite.

These are tactics designed to stifle legitimate debate and intimidate people into silence. Ferguson is simply the latest to learn that in today’s discrimination-obsessed society, you express an opinion at your peril.

Now let’s look at the case of British author David Goodhart, whose recent book The British Dream: Successes and Failures of Postwar Immigration has polarised reviewers.

Goodhart’s book argues that mass immigration is damaging to social democracy, erodes national solidarity and is not in the interests of the source countries, because it deprives them of some of their most dynamic people.

It’s a view that has not gone down well with some on the British left, who consider it an obligation of the prosperous West to throw open its doors to people from less advantaged countries, even when some of those immigrants violently turn against their host society.

The director of Britain’s leading literary festival, the Hay festival, was so affronted by Goodhart’s book that he refused to invite him to appear. Effectively, Goodhart was barred. The director, Peter Florence, arbitrarily pronounced that his book wasn’t very good.

So much for free speech, then. Having hijacked the once honourable word “liberal”, which my Oxford Dictionary variously defines as “directed to general broadening of the mind” and “generous or open-minded”, the so-called liberal left has once again demonstrated that it’s capable of being breathtakingly illiberal.

Mr Florence didn’t want his rigid world view challenged. Neither did he want festival-goers exposed to dangerous alternative opinions. I wonder if it has occurred to him that it’s only a short step from barring authors to burning books, as the Nazis did.

A former Labour cabinet minister, Lord Adonis, was appalled. “How about some free speech at the Hay festival?” he tweeted.

For the third instance of free speech coming under attack, we can look a lot closer to home. Al Nisbet’s two newspaper cartoons on the subject of free school breakfasts brought out the enemies of free speech in droves.

Remarkably, his critics included journalists, which shows how far the rot has set in. When the people who have the most to lose from the suppression of free speech are calling for someone to be silenced, we’re in deep trouble.

For the record, I thought they were crude cartoons; but the issue was not whether they were good cartoons, still less whether they were funny. The issue was whether freedom of speech includes the right to give offence, and it has long been recognised in liberal democracies that it does, and must. Even conservative judges have repeatedly upheld that principle.

There is an insidious double standard at play here, and it was typified by the stance of the activist John Minto, who complained about the cartoon to the Human Rights Commission.

Mr Minto’s own views upset and offend a lot of New Zealanders, but to my knowledge no one argues that he should be punished or silenced. Yet he seeks to deny others the right that he enjoys himself – and I suspect that he’s incapable of seeing the contradiction.

 

 

 

 

Who's Norman trying to kid?

Russel Norman’s speech to the annual conference of the Greens, in which he compared John Key with Robert Muldoon, rated a 10 for desperation and a zero for credibility.

I’m no cheerleader for Key, but even to mention him in the same breath as Muldoon is laughable.

Norman arrived in New Zealand from Australia in 1997, and on the basis of his speech I would guess that’s about as far back as his knowledge of our political history extends.

None of the prime ministers we’ve had since Muldoon could be compared with him, for which we should be grateful. He was a vindictive bully who cleverly exploited the politics of fear and division, and never more so than during the 1981 Springbok tour.

In fact I would suggest that in terms of personality, Key is the least like Muldoon. Anyone old enough to remember the political unpleasantness of the late 1970s and early 80s – which probably excludes a lot of Green voters – would have reacted with astonishment to Norman’s bizarre attempt to compare the two men.

Muldoon's default facial expression was a snarl. Key's is a grin (or if you want to be harsh, a smirk).

Arguably, the politician who most closely resembles Muldoon, and who served his apprenticeship under him, is Winston Peters. Like Muldoon, Peters has a penchant for demagoguery. But even the New Zealand First leader falls far short of Muldoon’s menacing intolerance of dissent, though it might have been a different story had he ever won power.

There are only two possible explanations for Norman’s attack on Key. The first is that, as postulated above, he knows nothing about our modern political history (not that that stops him from promoting himself as a credible alternative leader). The second, which is even more worrying, is that he knows the comparison between Key and Muldoon is absurd but ran with it anyway. Perhaps he senses the Greens’ momentum is slipping and is prepared to resort to extreme measures to get some traction.

Whichever way you look at it, the speech will have done nothing to enhance his credibility, other than in the eyes of the terminally gullible idealists who make up the Greens’ core constituency.

Charter schools: a good idea, badly handled

(First published in The Dominion Post, May 31.)

BY THE TIME you read this, Parliament may have passed the legislation introducing charter schools.

It’s a worthwhile experiment that almost didn’t deserve to succeed. Like the poorly executed state asset privatisation policy, the charter schools proposal aroused avoidable suspicion and antagonism by the clumsy way it was handled.

Charter schools went unmentioned in the 2011 election campaign. The proposal emerged into the light only later, as part of ACT’s coalition agreement with National. Yet we can assume there were discussions between the two parties long before that.

If a policy is worth adopting, its backers should have the confidence to toss it into the public arena and be prepared to explain and defend it. Instead, opponents were able to portray the charter schools idea as having been introduced by stealth, as if it were something to be ashamed of – which it wasn’t.

The impression that it wasn’t quite kosher was reinforced by the peculiar decision to place charter schools outside the Official Information Act. Again, this enabled the usual array of interest groups bent on protecting the status quo in education to howl that the government had something to hide.

And it didn’t help that the politician nominally behind charter schools, associate education minister John Banks, is arguably the most discredited man in Parliament. The more he was kept out of public view the better.

It fell to former ACT president Catherine Isaac, chairwoman of the partnership schools working group, to go to bat for the proposal, which she did coolly and professionally. But she often seemed to be battling alone against a phalanx of well-organised (and largely taxpayer-funded) opponents.

It became almost a textbook example of how to allow the other side to dictate the running. But if the worth of the charter schools proposal can be measured by the sheer fury of the opposition, as I believe it can, then we’re on to a good thing. And if we’re not, monitoring will soon expose any shortcomings.

After all, it’s not as if the entire primary school sector is being handed holus-bolus to a dodgy Las Vegas-based corporation run by men who drive around in stretch limos with tinted windows, even if some of the wilder statements made by charter schools opponents gave that impression.

* * *

PART OF ME sometimes wishes that the Chinese security men who roughed up Greens co-leader Russel Norman outside Parliament a couple of years ago would come back and do the job properly.

There’s something deeply irritating about the way Dr Norman pops up like a hyperactive jack in the box night after night on the television news. He looks so pleased with himself – as well he might, since he’s in the safe position of never having to do anything other than criticise.

He reached a 10 on the irritation scale last week when he crowed that small retail investors – the so-called “mums and dads” – had ended up with a relatively small proportion of shares in Mighty River Power.

The implication was that partial privatisation was all a con, designed to enrich already wealthy institutions and big investors. What Dr Norman failed to mention was that mums and dads had almost certainly been frightened off by fears that the newly announced Labour-Greens electricity policy would render their investment worthless. In other words, what Dr Norman criticised as a political trick by the government was in fact the entirely predictable consequence of his own cynical machinations.

Perversely, the Labour-Greens policy ensured that the big sharemarket players ended up with a disproportionately large slice of the partially privatised company – hardly something for the Left to be proud of.

While I don’t relish the thought of the Greens finding themselves in government, there would be some consolation in the prospect of Dr Norman having his own feet held to the fire for a change.

In the meantime he should realise the public doesn’t have an infinite appetite for tiresome carping. It might be in his interests to dial it back a bit.

* * *

THERE IS a connection, though it may not be obvious, between free breakfasts in schools and police pursuits of rogue drivers.

When police become reluctant to pursue law-breaking drivers for fear of causing a fatal crash, more people are encouraged to try it on. 

In the same way, when parents realise it doesn’t matter if they don’t provide breakfast for their children because the school will, more will decide it’s okay to send the kids off each morning with an empty stomach.

Just as police often get the blame when a fleeing driver wraps his car around a tree, so it will become the government’s fault that children are hungry, even though their parents may have the resources to feed them. Both involve a transfer of moral responsibility.

Child poverty is an appalling thing, but you have to wonder where all this might lead. Once people are relieved of personal responsibility for their actions (or failure to act, as in the case of negligent parents), almost anything becomes possible.

 

The problem with the Stones is that they're just greedy

(First published in the Nelson Mail and Manawatu Standard, May 22.)

Is the Rolling Stones juggernaut finally running out of steam? That’s the question people are asking overseas as fans baulk at the preposterous prices the British rock veterans are charging on their latest American tour.

According to reports from the United States, the band’s management has had to slash ticket prices because of poor sales. The alternative was to play to half-empty venues – not a good look for an act that has long claimed to be “the greatest rock and roll band in the world”.

Prices for the tour were originally set at $US170 in the cheap section, $635 for a premium seat and $2000 for a VIP package. A music blogger wrote that the cost was prohibitive for anyone not working in investment banking.

Compare that with the price of tickets to see Paul McCartney later this year: $50 in Seattle, $39.50 in Milwaukee. Fleetwood Mac and Tom Petty are reportedly charging modest prices too, and selling well. So it’s not as if fans are no longer interested in seeing old stagers recapturing their glory days.

Part of the problem may be that the Stones are running on empty. Their last No 1 hit in the US (Miss You) was in 1978 – 35 years ago. They haven’t made the Billboard Hot 100 chart since 1998, when Saint of Me rose to the dizzy height of No 94.

Their last album, A Bigger Bang, was in 2005. How long can they expect fans to keep paying for variations of the same old routine?

But familiarity – dare I even suggest boredom? – is only one part of the explanation for resistance to the Stones’ ticket prices. I suspect the band is paying the price for good old-fashioned greed.

The Stones have never come cheap, and as their recorded output has dwindled they have had to rely more heavily on tours to maintain them in the lifestyle to which they have become accustomed. Their Bigger Bang tour of 2005-6 was declared the highest-grossing tour of all time, earning $437 million. But they may have pushed their luck too far.

Certainly, some of their fans seem to be seeing them in a more critical light. “I have to give them respect for what they have done, but now they seem like an embarrassment,” Cameron Bowman told the San Francisco Chronicle. “Seriously, how much more money do they need? I feel like they are in Donald Trump or Gordon Gekko territory – just money for money's sake.”

Here we’re getting to the nub of the issue. For more than 50 years the Stones have been remarkably successful in passing themselves off as working-class rebels and heroes of 1960s counterculture, thumbing their noses at the capitalist establishment. The gullible fans bought it unquestioningly.

Perhaps they are now finally waking up to the reality that the band members are capitalists to the core, as fervently committed to making money as any giant multinational corporation. It shouldn’t be forgotten that the band moved en masse to the south of France in the 1970s to escape paying British taxes.

Let’s look at Sir Michael Philip Jagger, in particular. Jagger’s entire career has been built on fakery.

Some of the other original Stones – notably Bill Wyman and Keith Richards – had a legitimate claim to the working-class pose the band assumed in its early years, but Jagger came from an impeccably bourgeois background. His father was a schoolteacher and his mother was an active member of the Conservative Party. Jagger attended the relatively select Dartford Grammar School.

Given this background, it astounds me that for decades Jagger has managed to make a fabulously lucrative career pretending to sound like a black man from the mean streets of urban America. The jive talk, the bluesy inflections – it’s an astonishingly cheeky pastiche, but he’s carried it off.

As for that anti-establishment persona, which persists to this day (and which Jagger still promotes), it’s hard to reconcile with his immense fortune, which is estimated at nearly $US300 million. I don’t see how you can claim to be part of the revolution while living in the palace.

He’s reputed to be tight-fisted too. Jagger is a rarity among wealthy showbiz figures, and rarer still among knights of the realm, for having no known record of charitable work or public service.

This is no great surprise. Some of the meanest, most grasping individuals I’ve known were people who assiduously cultivated their anti-capitalist credentials.

You may deduce from all this that I dislike Jagger, but that’s true only up to a point. I think he’s a phony, but good luck to him if he can get away with it. My irritation is with all those dopey fans who still worship him as a totem of the protest generation.

Like most of my generation I’ve enjoyed the music of the Stones, though I wouldn’t call myself a hard-core fan. They made some great records, albeit a long time ago, and on the one occasion I saw them in concert (again, decades ago) I thought they probably merited the label of greatest rock and roll band in the world.

I have a grudging admiration for the wizened old reprobate Keith Richards, who strikes me as a much more genuine and likeable individual than Jagger, and more seriously committed to music for its own sake. 

But the band is stretching credulity – in fact defying gravity – by continuing to masquerade as down-and-dirty rock and roll rebels after more than 50 years.  No one can pretend that their appeal rests on anything other than nostalgic yearning for the heady days of Honky Tonk Women and Gimme Shelter, when we were all young, idealistic and beautiful (well, young and idealistic, at least).

It’s pathetic, really. Perhaps the Stones would be doing themselves and everyone else a favour by pricing themselves out of the market. Then they could quietly retire and take up indoor bowls, or some such activity as befits their age.

 

 

 

 

 

 

An audience of two at the Regent 3

Last night I had what can only be described as a Masterton experience. I went to the movies at the Regent 3, and for the first time in my life found myself sitting alone in the cinema. It was such a novelty I had to ring my wife and tell her. (Well, it wasn’t as if my phone call was going to disturb anyone.)

A few minutes before the movie started, my solitude was disturbed by the arrival of another patron. This again was pure Masterton, because I knew him; he was a well-known local journalist.  

We laughed at the oddity of the situation, but Alistair said it wasn’t the first time this had happened to him. On previous occasions, finding himself alone, he’d shouted out to the projectionist to skip the advertisements. That’s pretty Masterton, too.

Alistair sat down towards the front and the movie rolled (or whatever movies do in the digital era). It soon became apparent why there were only two of us. The rest of Masterton knew something we didn’t. Gambit was a stinker of a film.

I was half-prepared for this, because I’d read highly critical reviews as well as laudatory ones. In the latest Listener, Helene Wong gives Gambit only two stars. But I desperately wanted to like it because the screenplay was written by the Coen brothers – the same team responsible for Fargo, The Big Lebowski, O Brother, Where Art Thou? and other gems. The Coens, I persuaded myself, are incapable of producing a dud. Perhaps the critics just didn’t get the joke.

Besides, there was a classy cast: Colin Firth, Cameron Diaz, Alan Rickman, Tom Courtenay and Stanley Tucci. How could it fail?

Alas, it was irredeemably rotten from start to finish. There were traces of the familiar Coen Brothers formula, which often involves bumbling amateur criminals hatching audacious plots that go hilariously, gruesomely wrong. But in this case (spoiler alert!) they pull it off. Perhaps that’s why the movie doesn’t work; it lacks that essential Coen Brothers blackness.

Whatever the explanation, Gambit never raised so much as a snigger from the audience of two at the Regent 3. Alistair gave up and left about 20 minutes from the end. I persisted to the last – partly because I was transfixed by its sheer awfulness but also, I think, because I was hoping against hope that it might redeem itself in the last moments. You never know with a Coen Brothers script.

Well, it didn’t. It ended as flatly and predictably as it had unfolded. As the credits rolled, I felt the situation called for a Statler and Waldorf comment, but Waldorf had left the building.

The elimination of poverty will just have to wait

(First published in The Dominion Post, May 17.)

THE TEAM of Key and English may go down as one of the more effective political partnerships of modern times.

John Key is the schmoozer, the salesman. His incorrigibly sunny disposition infuriates a lot of people, who see it as smarmy and ingratiating. But it’s hard to argue with his poll ratings, which have held up extraordinarily well after one and a half terms during which the government has had to grapple with one crisis after another.

With the passage of time, Mr Key has also demonstrated an increasing command of policy detail, something that eluded him in the early days of his prime ministership.

Bill English is the dour Southlander doing the hard graft behind the scenes. While Captain Key is up on the bridge waving reassuringly to the passengers, chief engineer English is down below shovelling coal into the boilers.

He’s not as relaxed in the public eye and lacks his boss’s charisma. He had an unhappy time as National leader (the party suffered its worst-ever electoral defeat on his watch), but seems to have found his niche as Minister of Finance.

History may view him as a safe pair of hands – to use a classically understated New Zealand compliment – during a turbulent period that called for steady nerves.

While media attention was focused on political scrub fires – the Dotcom saga, the GCSB, Novopay, the whiffy Sky City deal, Mighty River Power – New Zealand has quietly been winning international regard for the way it has weathered the global financial crisis.

Only this week, both the International Monetary Fund and credit ratings agency Standard and Poor’s endorsed the government’s economic approach. S and P places us among the world’s 10 least risky economies.

There’s definitely a sense that we’ve turned the corner. Economic growth is gathering speed and unemployment is starting to fall. It seems ironic that this should happen just as Australia, which seemed to sail through the GFC almost unscathed, is being battered by severe head winds.

The great migration across the ditch (which National promised to halt, but didn’t) may soon start to reverse itself as the Lucky Country battens down the hatches.

* * *

OF COURSE the economic purists will find much to complain about in the Budget. Voter bribes such as interest-free student loans and Working for Families, introduced by Labour, remain in place.

These are a continuing affront to people who insist that a centre-right party should have no truck with such policies. The arguments here are uncannily similar to those in Britain, where the Conservative Party is locked into a coalition government with the Liberal Democrats and finds itself shackled by policies that run counter to classic principles of economic liberalism.

National abandoned ideological purity decades ago, recognising that it was no way to win elections. Keith Holyoake created the pragmatist legacy of which Mr Key is the perfect inheritor. The Key formula is to do whatever works and whatever wins elections. 

It’s a style of politics that the late Margaret Thatcher, the ultimate conviction politician, had no time for. But in the MMP era, when compromise and deal-making are the keys to political survival, the purists just have to learn to live with it.

* * *

AS ALWAYS in the days leading up to the Budget, a parade of professional supplicants shuffled forward this week with begging bowls extended.

All the usual suspects lined up in the media, demanding that the government throw more money at the worthy causes du jour. One modest goal urged on the government was the elimination of poverty – surely something any finance minister with a social conscience should be able to achieve at a stroke.

Other items on the wish list included thousands more state houses, breakfasts for starving schoolchildren and free bariatric surgery, which the medical profession tells us is essential if we’re to avoid a “tsunami” of obesity-induced diabetes.

On Radio New Zealand’s Morning Report, I heard one advocate for the poor saying it wasn’t enough to provide free breakfasts for kids from decile 1 and 2 schools. The government had a responsibility, he pronounced, to feed all schoolchildren.

On the same programme a housing activist, while grudgingly conceding that the government was on the right track by increasing housing capacity, made it clear that whatever was announced in the Budget would be hopelessly inadequate.

Most striking, as usual, was what went unmentioned.

No one thought to say where the money would come from. Too difficult. Perhaps they think it’s magically conjured out of the air rather than generated by taxpayers, which first requires a prosperous economy.

And no one made any reference to where individual responsibility – as in making sure children are fed before going to school, or saying no to that extra litre of ice cream – sits in their view of the perfect world.